1. Have voice mail on your phone lines : Imagine a scenario, wherein a buyer has collected a list of few suppliers and you are one of them. He calls you and gets and a busy tone. He tries another supplier's number and gets a voice mail saying 'This is Vivek Joshi. Sorry I cannot take your call right now. Please leave your name and complete number with country and area code and we will get back to you as soon as possible' Which of the two suppliers is more likely to make more contacts? This could happen even during off office hours as the buyer will get a permanent ringing tone. Solutions could be voice mail, call forwarding, using call waiting, caller id or answering machine depending on your telecom company. Basically, you must have a system where a person can leave a message if your phone is busy or no one is there to attend it. You can argue that someone can always try later but is it not our job to make it easier for people to get to us? 2. Have a dedicated fax line : Nothing irritates a buyer more than a fax line on which a human picks up and says 'hello'. Even ones which say 'Dial 3 to send a fax ' are useless as most people nowadays use 'Email to Fax' or Fax software to send faxes. So get a dedicated fax line (always up) as soon as possible. Not only do you not get the fax, the sender forms an opinion of you being difficult to reach. 3. Always include complete contact details in all emails you send. A simple way is to use signature files. Makes sure you mention your website in every email. Make sure all employees use a standardized signature file. 4. If you have a website, get to know the number of visitors you are getting and how are they getting there. Ask your web hosting provider for web statistics if you do not know what they are. 5. If you have a website, look at it critically from a buyer's viewpoint and see if your website does the following - Make the visitor believe you know your business well - Provide more information than competitors - Enhance your credibility - Make the visitor feel like contacting you - Is your contact information easily accessible 6. Always have a contact form on your website in addition to giving your address, phone, fax and email. With a contact form, you can get additional details of the visitor and more importantly, you make sure you get the details which you can miss with email with so much spam and spam blocking 7. Maintain a categorized list of buyers whom you can easily contact whenever you wish. I am amazed at the number of people who have no record of who contacted them a few months back just because they ran out of space and deleted old emails. 8. Have a backup plan for your data on your computers in place. Your computer is a machine and it can conk off any time. And hard disk crashes are most common. You can lose all your data and with it all important contacts you have collected over years. With CD writers becoming inexpensive, there is no excuse for not having one for backing up your data. A way to simplify this is to store all data in one directory. So backing up involves just writing that one directory into one CD. 9. Learn to listen and understand the pulse of the potential buyer. Find out what drives him. Although I know all of you will jump and say 'price', You know that there is zillions of dollars of business being done at a price much higher than 'best possible price' even when buyers know that. It is being done because of timely delivery, quality assurance, excellent communication, comfort level or special customization, etc. Each buyer has some factors he holds as key. Once you know that, you should be able to reassure him on that front. 10. Most valuable tip for the last. Find out what your competitive advantages are and build your business around them. Competitive advantages can come from cost advantages, access to markets, access to specialized/regulated information, etc. The important thing is to understand it and translate it into tangible benefit that a potential buyer will get by doing business with you. Whew, that was one long mail. I have enjoyed writing it and hope you have found it useful. As always your feedback is most welcome Regards Vivek Joshi CEO - Wyzen Systems Private Limited